Le Figaro carried a nice story on its front page this morning. In Kansas City, someone dressed as Father Christmas knocked on the door of 47 year old Herman Smithey, a policeman suffering from terminal cancer. Herman’s salary does not cover the cost of his medical treatment. The stranger thrust $2,000 into Herman’s hand, in $100 bills.

The story tells us a lot about the generosity of one man, and the inhumanity of the American medical system.

I see that the man who paraded with an ‘impossible’ array of medals has been identified as a 61 year old carpenter. How very disappointing. I had naturally assumed that anyone sporting that much metal must be a member of the royal family.

When President Sarkozy criticised the Anglo-American economic model recently, mistakenly calling it the Anglo-Saxon model, there was a storm of protest approaching paranoia. Most comments were in support of free-market capitalism, or liberal capitalism. What’s in a name? The message seemed to presume that the Anglo-American model is in some way faithful to the political-economy of Adam smith, and the comparative advantage theory of David Ricardo. None of the protesters appeared to realise that the Anglo-American model represents a significant shift away from Smith and Ricardo, and, indeed, from capitalism.

The Anglo-American model of today is a new model, for which a name has perhaps yet to be coined. In the absence of an agreed name, I call it Assured Corporatism. A capitalist economy is one in which those risking their capital can be enriched if they get it right, and impoverished if they get it wrong. It is an amoral system, some would call it brutal. That system is effectively dead in the UK and USA, except low down in the pecking order. At the top we have Assured Corporatism, whereby the risk is removed for those making the decisions. This is not confined to the banks.

A property speculator bought land in Rochdale that had once been occupied by Turner & Newell, the asbestos company. Having bought the land, the developers found it to be contaminated, and in need of thorough cleansing before they could build on it. They have asked for government funds to clean the site. That is not capitalism.

Finally, Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory has for long been invalidated by developments in technology transfer, and transport. Comparative advantage now exists largely in one commodity: labour. Those who see labour as merely a commodity are inviting social unrest on a scale not seen since the rise of Hitler. To divorce ‘economics’ from politics is to commit a profound philosophical error: a costly one.